Friday, April 27, 2018

SEIU-UHW Spends $14M on Ballot Initiatives in 14 Months

While tens
of thousands of teachers are striking and winning in multiple states, SEIU-UHW’s Dave Regan is pursuing a very different approach to building the
labor movement.

Since 2009 (when
Regan was appointed the union’s trustee), SEIU-UHW has conducted virtually no
strikes whatsoever despite being one of the largest unions in California.

Instead of
organizing workers, Regan has diverted tens of millions of dollars from
SEIU-UHW’s budget into ballot initiatives. In 2017, he spent approximately $10
million of SEIU-UHW’s budget on ballot initiatives -- about 10% of the union’s
budget. In 2018, he’s on track to spend even more.

What’s Regan
trying to do?

Basically,
he’s hoping he can use the threat of ballot initiatives to pressure healthcare
companies into deals with him. That’s what he tried to do (unsuccessfully) with
the California
Hospital Association.

This year,
he’s trying to put nine initiatives on the California ballot. Two of them target
DaVita, a kidney dialysis
company where SEIU-UHW’s organizing efforts were unsuccessful, according to
NLRB records.

Another
initiative targets Watsonville Community
Hospital, where SEIU-UHW has been unsuccessful in negotiating a contract
for its members. Other initiatives target Stanford
Health Care, where SEIU-UHW was unsuccessful in organizing workers at one
of Stanford’s hospitals. And there are others.

Will Regan’s
ballot initiatives be successful?

So far, none
of his 20+ ballot initiatives has succeeded during the past seven years. That
is… they haven’t led SEIU-UHW to organize a single worker. And that’s after Regan
spent approximately $30 million on these initiatives. Not a record to write
home about.

A DaVita dialysis clinic

How much is
Regan spending on his 2018 ballot initiatives?

Beaucoup
bucks.

In 2017, he spent
approximately $10 million, according to SEIU-UHW’s DOL Form LM-2.

For example,
he paid $1.2 million to a company to collect voters’ signatures to qualify
initiatives for the ballot (Kimball
Petition Management). He paid more than a half million dollars to polling
firms to survey voters about his initiatives (ALG Research and Fairbanks Maslin
Maullin Metz & Associates, Inc.). He spent another half million on
lawyers, advertising firms, media agents, consultants and travel.

Regan gave
the biggest chunk of change ($7.3 million) to a spinoff organization he created
called “The Fairness Project.” The
organization, which is headed by SEIU-UHW staffer Steve Trossman (he’s the organization’s “President”), not only
supports ballot initiatives in California but also tries to spread their use in
other states by funding various initiatives. According to the organization’s
website, it has backed ballot initiatives to raise the minimum wage, expand
Medicaid, and establish laws around paid sick time in a dozen states.

The website,
however, doesn’t say whether “The Fairness Project” is also funding Regan’s
ballot initiatives against the dialysis industry in Arizona and Ohio, which
Regan filed recently in an apparent effort to intensify his pressure on DaVita.

After
spending roughly $10 million in 2017, Regan spent millions more during the
first few of months of 2018. In February, for example, SEIU-UHW paid $3.5
million to buy TV, newspaper and online ads in California, Washington DC,
Colorado and Massachusetts targeting DaVita and Fresenius (another kidney dialysis company), according to a press release issued by
SEIU-UHW.

And things
are about to get much more expensive.

Earlier this
month, SEIU-UHW submitted 600,000 signatures to the state, and is now waiting to
hear whether its kidney dialysis initiatives have qualified for the November
2018 ballot.

In response,
DaVita and Fresenius have begun airing TV and online ads attacking SEIU-UHW and
its ballot initiatives. They also launched a website called www.UHWinitiativeabuse.com

Image from dialysis industry's ad against SEIU-UHW

Of course,
it’s possible the corporations will get nervous and decide to try to cut some kind
of deal with Regan to get the initiatives off the ballot.

It’s also
possible these deep-pocketed corporate giants will decide to go toe-to-toe with
Regan at the ballot box. The companies have lots of money -- $3.9 billion in
combined profits in 2016, according to SEIU-UHW. This would force Regan to
spend tens of millions on a costly campaign to try to win the vote. California,
the most populous state in the nation, is notoriously expensive when it comes
to elections -- tens of millions of voters spread across some of the most
expensive media markets in the nation.

Aside from
its costliness and lack of success, a larger problem with Regan’s approach is it
turns unions into a kind of Political Action Committee (PAC) run by technocrats
and consultants rather than well-organized, worker-led organizations capable of
exerting their power on the shop floor to get a fair share from
corporations. Most observers agree we need to build the latter kind of union,
not Regan’s PAC version.

For example,
imagine if Regan had spent $30 million on actually organizing workers instead
of funding failed ballot initiatives?

Labor
leaders like Regan, when they don’t have the ability or will to lead workers to fight, often look for crutches… like ballot initiatives. In this
case, Regan’s crutch appears to have become his entire strategy.

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